Pacing the outer edge of a thousand-pace square proved only that the boundaries were lawful. It didn’t prove what lay inside the prism.
At Horizon scale, the physical survey rules laid down in Chapter Seventy-One were total and unforgiving. A map maker was needed to execute grid traversals at quarter-width intervals across the entire inside of the parcel, inspecting every attached structure, sounding every grid intersection, and confirming that the inside volume was free of unmapped cavities, cut stonework, or living blockers.
For a parcel one thousand and twenty-four paces wide, quarter-width intervals meant walking three full north-south lines and three full east-west lines across the plateau. At the two-hundred-and-fifty-six-pace, five-hundred-and-twelve-pace, and seven-hundred-and-sixty-eight-pace map points.
Six full miles of inside grid walking across open granite terraces, under an afternoon sun that was beginning to cast long, blue-gray shadows from the western crags.
Kezra stood at the two-hundred-and-fifty-six-pace mark along the northern stepped rim, checking her transit posture. Two hundred paces to the south, on the opposite rim of the plateau, Bram and Orel had erected two tall spruce sighting poles banded with scarlet wool pennants. By keeping the two poles lined up in the aiming cross of her brass sight, Kezra ensured that she and Yseld would walk a straight, true line across the stony plateau without veering a single foot off course.
